Contra Costa NOW

NOW Hear This: August 16, 2024 Newsletter

Message from National NOW President Christian F. Nunes

Greetings Feminists,

This week’s holiday is a good moment to reflect on the issue of freedom and liberty for women.  We’re still a long way from full equality, starting with constitutional equality.

The word “woman” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, and to the privileged white men who wrote it, many of them slaveholding, that was just the way they wanted it.

These men didn’t want women to own property, vote or have bodily autonomy. They saw women’s rights and status as secondary to men’s, and they wanted to keep it that way.

Generations of women have endured a system that generally pays them less, values them less, respects them less and treats them as second-class citizens. The principles of democracy, equality and justice we revere are made hollow by the systemic, sex-based inequality and structural gender discrimination baked into our laws.

NOW’s core issues include Constitutional Equality, Ending Violence Against Women, and Racial Justice, among others.  As this article from Ms. Magazine reports,  “The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) will provide an explicit guarantee of sex equality in the Constitution and empower Congress to enforce it and address gender-based violence.” And the ERA Coalition explains how the ERA will empower survivors of domestic violence:

“The Equal Rights Amendment holds the potential to be a powerful catalyst for cultural and political change in the fight against domestic violence. By establishing sex equality as a fundamental constitutional right, the ERA will help challenge harmful gender stereotypes, ensure equal access to resources and legal protection for all survivors, and ultimately eradicate domestic violence.”

“The Equal Rights Amendment holds the potential to be a powerful catalyst for cultural and political change in the fight against domestic violence. By establishing sex equality as a fundamental constitutional right, the ERA will help challenge harmful gender stereotypes, ensure equal access to resources and legal protection for all survivors, and ultimately eradicate domestic violence.”

The ERA Coalition also reports on how the ERA is at the intersection of gender and race and why it’s such an important step towards racial justice, quoting the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray:

“Black women, historically, have been doubly victimized by the twin immoralities of Jim Crow and Jane Crow.”

While we celebrate this week’s holiday and think about the meaning of liberty, we can’t forget how much more needs to be done before we can fulfill the promise of “liberty and justice for all.”

There’s never been a more important time to be raising our voice for constitutional equality.

Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification in 1972, with a seven-year ratification deadline.  Alice Paul, who wrote the original Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, cited that deadline as the reason for the ERA’s difficult journey, saying it gave states encouragement to delay and run out the clock.

“(Opponents) thought the only way they could defeat it now was not by an outright vote against but by making difficulties in ratification,” Paul said in an oral history with Amelia Fry, an historian at the University of California, Berkeley.

Since the expiration of the 1982 deadline, three states, Nevada, Illinois and Virginia, have ratified the ERA.  Virginia, the last state needed, voted to ratify in 2020.

Now, ERA leaders in Congress are working to pass resolutions to recognize the ERA and for the archivist of the United States to add the amendment to the Constitution.  After all these years, we are closer than ever to constitutional equality—and that’s why we need to raise our voices.

We must speak out for legal protection against discrimination on the basis of sex.  As the ERA Coalition writes, 

“This means that both men and women will be guaranteed equal rights under the law, including in the workplace. For example, currently, women in the U.S. still earn less than men for doing the same job. This is a form of sex discrimination that the ERA would help to eliminate. By ensuring equal pay for equal work, the ERA would help to boost the economy by increasing the spending power of women and the families they support (and don’t we want everyone contributing to the growth of the economy?).

We must speak out for gender equality in all aspects of life. Constitutional equality means that we live in a society in which all people are treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their sex. The ERA would help eliminate sex discrimination in systems of education, healthcare, childcare, family and parenting and social and cultural attitudes that limit opportunities available to women.

We must speak out for a constitutional amendment to realize the promise of legal equality and justice for all. Our modern vision of equality demands comprehensive equal protection. Indeed, many individuals are themselves members of numerous communities, identities, and protected classes, and true equality and justice demand protections that recognize the interconnected nature of discrimination.

In Solidarity
Christian F. Nunes
President

Haley Solis is an undergraduate student at Stanford University, where she is pursuing a degree in Environmental Systems Engineering.  She attended Hercules High School where she founded their Environmental Club.  One of her accomplishments while she was in high school was to implement a composting program.  This was no easy feat as it required her to coordinate with the school district’s unionized custodial staff.  She also set up composting programs for several small businesses in her community. 

One of our previous winners in 2021 Thyra Cobbs earned her Baccalaureate Degree in African American Studies at UCLA.  At UCLA she currently is a McNair Scholar and also serves as Chairperson of the African Student Union.  Thyra has been accepted to continue her studies at UCLA in their African American M. A. Program.  Thyra is from the Brentwood area of Contra Costa County.

Each winner received a $1,000 scholarship.

NOW Celebrates Juneteenth

June 19, 2024

Juneteenth, the day that marks of the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War has been celebrated by African Americans since the late 1800s, but it wasn’t until 2021 that it became a federal holiday.

President Biden signed legislation to make June 19th a federal holiday that year, following the renewed demand for attention to be paid following the death of George Floyd the previous summer.  Standing beside him was 93-year old Opal Lee, “the Grandmother of Juneteenth,” who as this NPR story explains, had waged a decades-long fight to make Juneteenth a U.S. holiday.

After decades of working on Juneteenth celebrations in her home state of Texas, with the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society, at the age of 89 she decided to “spread the word about Juneteenth to everybody.” She set out on a walking campaign from her home in Forth Worth to Washington, D.C.

“I was thinking that surely, somebody would see a little old lady in tennis shoes trying to get to Congress and take notice,” she said. What became annual walks culminated in a trip to the Capitol to deliver a petition signed by 1.5 million Americans supporting a federal holiday.

You can learn more about Opal Lee, and about today’s Opal’s Walk 2024 here.  And you can meet Opal Lee in this  video from just this past Friday showing her recent Forth Worth homecoming.

Of course, having a federal holiday to commemorate the date that enslaved Africans and African Americans in Texas learned of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation doesn’t mean that white supremacy has been put to rest. Black Americans are continuously mistreated and harmed by systemic racism, discrimination and denial of opportunity at every level. 

Vice President Harris has declared this Juneteenth as one of three National Days of Action on Voting. With a focus on voter engagement, these National Days of Action on Voting aim to ensure all Americans have the information they need to vote, promote voter participation for students, protect election workers, and fight voter suppression laws. Other National Days of Action on Voting are the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 2024 and National Voter Registration Day on September 17, 2024.

Juneteenth has always been a family celebration with an eye on history.  This November, we can change the course of history and keep the spirit of Juneteenth alive by electing more Black women!  And more leaders who will fight for equality.

In solidarity,
Christian F. Nunes
President

Thanks to indivisible… this chart gives us a reason to get up each morning and keep fighting for our rights, our dignity, our autonomy and our democracy.

What Could We Lose in 2024?

What Can You Do?

VOTE!

Over-the-Counter Contraception is a Necessity 

May 11, 2023

WASHINGTON, D.C. – – In a historic move, an FDA advisory committee of outside experts unanimously voted to approve nonprescriptive contraception for over-the-counter (OTC) use. Sixty-three years since the FDA first approved hormonal birth control medication, this no-prescription birth control pill can vastly expand reproductive justice for all women. 

Nonprescription, over-the-counter contraceptives are safe and have been available in more than 100 countries for years. Once formally approved by the FDA, this decision will provide a critical lifeline to marginalized women living in rural areas, on reservations, and in poverty-impacted communities. With increasing attacks on our reproductive freedoms, this news could not have come at a more critical moment. More than ever, women need better access to resources that empower them to take control of their reproductive decisions moving forward.

The National Organization for Women (NOW) is the nation’s leading membership-based advocacy group dedicated to defending women’s rights, advancing equality and combating injustice in all aspects of social, political and economic life. Through educating, mobilizing, and convening a vast network of grassroots activists across the country, NOW advocates for national, state and local policies that promote an anti-racist and intersectional feminist agenda. Since its founding in 1966, NOW has been on the frontlines of nearly every major advancement for women’s rights and continues to champion progressive values today. More about NOW’s efforts and resources is available at NOW.org.

In solidarity,
Christian F. Nunes
President

THE ISSUE

In less than two weeks, there could well be no access to one of the safest methods of abortion available, medication abortion, now used in a majority of abortions in the U.S.  – and widely used around the world. An anti-abortion organization, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, filed a lawsuit in November demanding that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdraw their approval of medication abortion. The judge has set a briefing deadline for February 24^th.

See link below for full details.

Medication Abortion Access Threatened by Texas Judge – NOW led the Effort to Bring Medication Abortion to the U.S. – Help Us Fight This 

We are at a transformational shift to a new era of gender equality in the United States, with feminist women holding some of the most consequential levers of power. 

Kamala Harris, a Black woman of South Asian descent, is the first woman vice president; for the first time in U.S. history, President Joe Biden has appointed equal numbers of women (now at 48%) to the Cabinet; and the House of Representatives is led by a feminist woman, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and feminists chair some of the most powerful committees including Rep. Maxine Waters of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of the Appropriations Committee and Rep. Carolyn Maloney of the Oversight and Reform Committee. 

There’s no denying that 2021 is going to be an exciting, impactful and critically important year in the long struggle for gender equality.